Touchstone Magazine
Part 1
By now most everyone's seen the video clip of "Joe the Plumber," making the rounds on the e-waves, in his brief conversation with the TV anchoress. What fascinates me about the interview was that it seemed we were watching creatures from two utterly different universes, or from two different epochs. The anchoress -- I'm not sure who it was; I don't watch them -- was all smiles, all makeup, with her expensive coif and her neat business suit. Then you have Joe, nearly bald, stocky, wearing an ordinary sweat shirt and jacket, hardly smiling at all; it was as if he thought that the election hinged upon matters that transcended the moment, and that were certainly more important than his own brief burst of notoriety.
I'd like to think that Joe may do his part in turning the election -- who knows? So I've decided to post something each day for the next week on what we can glean from that interview. The most significant, as I see it: Joe's refusal to take the socialist bait. We all complain about high taxes; even people I know who pay a small fraction of what I pay still complain about their payments. That's a part of living in a civilized society. It can mean as little as idle talk about the weather, or the Red Sox. Most of us, too, will concede that the idea of taxation is not inherently unjust. We need government to do some things that we cannot do, or can hardly do, on our own -- to provide for national defense, for instance. So we agree to pay taxes to enable the government to do that. It is a contribution (and it should be a modest contribution) to a part (and it should be a modest part) of the common good.
But what happens when taxes are used not for the sake of something we each have a share in, as roads and armies? Then we might see the tax code used, for instance, as a powerful weapon of social control -- and examples of this are everywhere to be found in our country; in fact, it's hard for me to determine whether the tax code as it stands is primarily a revenue gathering device for Washington, or a behavior controlling device. Yet that is not the worst use that taxes can be put to, not by far, even discounting the use of the money for what is downright evil, such as, to use Archbishop Chaput's recent words, the millions of "little murders" that we have committed over the last decades. One can collect taxes in order to rig up a vision of what a utopian society would look like, regardless of the fact that the vision is not shared by everyone, or that there is no tangible and immediate good that the taxes would purchase, in whose benefit everyone would share (as is the case with roads, and possibly with schools). And that's no more than state sanctioned theft.
The notorious eminent domain case coming out of -- where else? -- Chicago a few years ago is a case in point. Property was seized -- people were compelled to sell their homes -- not so that a new road would be built (roads do have to be built sometimes; that is the sort of thing that the provision for eminent domain was meant to allow for), but so that a private developer could come in, tear down the old homes, build new ones, sell them at a profit, and provide a bigger base of revenue for the city. If we chop out the middle steps in the series of exchanges, it amounted to nothing more than a claim by Chicago that the people in those homes had to sell them because Chicago wanted more money out of them, period. And that is analogous to Mr. Obama's statement to Joe the Plumber, that some people should pay higher taxes, not because they need to shoulder a fair share of the burden for building things that contribute to the common good (although, as it's been pointed out in many places, the lower forty percent of tax filers are paying no federal income tax at all), but simply because some people in power believe that it would be a good thing merely to take money from Joe and give it to Ed. Joe, in their august determination, has money to spare, and Ed would like some of it. At which point one wonders, morally, what the difference is, if Ed simply decided to cut out the middleman, to spare the taxpayers all the red tape, and maybe even to save Joe a little money too, by robbing him outright of, let's say, half of the money that the revenooers would have taken from Joe (while skimming their take from the top, for the laborer is worthy of his hire).
Joe understood all this. Asked by the anchoress what difference it made to him -- since he obviously did not make a quarter of a million dollars a year, he being a lowly plumber, of all things, and not a stylish anchoress reading fifth-grade English from a teleprompter -- if people making above that level were taxed at a higher rate, just an itty witty bit higher, he replied, almost as if his honor were impugned by the very question, that he didn't want their money to be taken from them. Why should he? "That's socialism," he said, cutting to the heart of the matter, noting that the rich already pay more in taxes, because they pay according to their higher income. It never occurred to the reporter, though you could see it was flashing through Joe's mind, that small business owners often file taxes as if they were single taxpayers, and that a quarter of a million dollars in a good year is by no means unthinkable for a contractor or a farmer. That doesn't make them permanently rich; there are some bad years mixed in with those good years; and there's no guarantee that you'll be able to continue doing that kind of difficult work until your old age. So, no, he didn't think it was a good idea to take money from his own pocket and stick it in someone else's, or to take money from someone else's pocket and stick it in his, merely because some poobah with authority grossly disproportionate to what he should justly exercise thought it was fine and dandy. It's as if the thief were to say, "What's it to you, pal? I'm only taking the cash. I'm leaving you your credit cards. The nerve of some people!"
And through it all I hear the sonorous voice of the Anointed One, the Blessed Obama, intoning that he did not want to punish Joe's success, no, but he did want to "spread the wealth around," he with the brother who lives in a hovel in Kenya, he with the running mate whose idea of charitable giving apparently is to flip a nickel once in a while to the drunk on the streetcorner. There's such a contrast there, too: the smug and spoiled academic, who has never met a payroll, never got his hands filthy or cut up with tough work, judging from his Solomonic chair just how much of the man's baby should be sliced off for the benefit of somebody else. "By what authority?" asked Joe, another question that the reporter never considered. For in this life, the only way to level is with a great big steamroller; we can only be made equal in one respect by means of monstrous inequality in another. But that's all right; we can all lie prone before the Messiah.
Part 2
One of the unhealthiest features of our current way of life, I'm persuaded, is the removal of "professionals" from the company and neighborhood of truck drivers, carpenters, concrete layers, miners, dressmakers, maids, and plumbers. When John McCain was growing up, no doubt, there was a certain stratification of American society according to income, as there is now. But in most places, the doctor lived near the bricklayer and went to the same church; not in the wealthy neighborhoods of the large cities, but in small cities, and small towns like the one where I grew up. More than that, men had that great experience of learning just what a snotty nose and a degree from Harvard will get you when you're digging a trench in boot camp, or sweating in the barracks on a summer night. A sergeant major with an unsteady grasp of grammar might put many a baby-chinned lieutenant from West Point in his place.
What's happened since is apparent in this presidential race, and in the interview with Joe the Plumber. Take Joe first. Here is a man who was going to leave the interview to go to a local gas station, because a water main had burst beneath it. He was being interviewed by a lady who looked as if she had never had to worry, all her life long, about breaking a fingernail at work. He was going to do a job that required hard, practical knowledge, and if he messed things up, it would mean at least a great mess, and at worst a disaster. Her job requires no such; the only risk she runs is that she might say something so silly that even a television audience might notice, and put her ratings in danger. He was about to handle hard, sometimes apparently intractable, materials, things that don't oblige our utopian dreams. The iron pipe does not condescend to political correctness. It won't say, "I see that I should move into place no matter who or what is lugging me, because that would be the democratic thing to do." There's a bracing reality in such things as iron, or earth, or even PVC, not to mention water, that wondrous bringer of life that can bring ruin, too, if it's not under control. You have to learn to submit to those realities, and yet master them anyway, to the extent that anyone can. And that's a lesson that should keep you from believing that men are infinitely malleable, can become just what really smart people can make them if only we trust those geniuses with tyrannical power -- when nothing else you see around you is so.
The anchor lady seems never to have had to learn such a lesson; she spoke to Joe the Plumber with all the bright eyed naivete of someone who believes that the Peaceable Kingdom is just around the corner. But, more worrisome than that, it is a lesson that Barack Obama has never had to learn. Not that he couldn't have learned it, had he spent a few years as a dockworker, or had he gone to haul building materials for construction in Kenya. Instead, he's the sort of person around whom I've spent most of my working life: he's an academic, gone into lawyering and then into politics. When he says to Joe the Plumber, "I don't want to punish your success; I just want to make sure that the guy behind you has the same opportunity," he says it with the superiority of an old-fashioned snob -- with this important qualitification: many an old-fashioned snob, like Franklin Roosevelt, spent time in the armed services, did a lot of work with his hands on the estate, and lived a vigorous life outdoors, among ostlers and farmers and such. He says it with not the slightest awareness that Joe is where he is not simply because of some abstract "opportunity," but because of that opportunity seized. He does not consider what it cost Joe to seize it: the hard work in often lousy conditions; the all-day, all-week jobs; the banged up toes and bruised knees and bad back; the chancy contracts; even the hardscrabble men you have to employ to get the work done. Obama wants to take Joe's money into his baby-smooth hands. Had he some half-inch thick calluses around the thumbs, he'd not be so quick to take it.
He'd understand -- and he does not in fact understand -- that he can sooner bring Ed, who lags behind Joe, up to Joe's standard, not by giving Ed some of Joe's money, but by making Ed adopt Joe's habits, or by giving Ed some of Joe's strengths. Let Ed be as smart as Joe. Let him have as strong a back. Let him not mind rain and mud. Let him not take so many breaks for food and drink and a cigarette. Let him have a better eye for the workers who cost you more than they are worth. Let him treat his customers with the same courtesy and honesty. Let him build up those same calluses. Or let him not do it -- perhaps Ed has determined he has better things to do with his time and his strength! That is fine, too.
One last thing that neither Obama nor the anchorlady understands. That is the leadership of men, in rough circumstances, to get a difficult job done. John McCain didn't grow up in a poor family, but during his teenage years and then in the academy he lived like a spartan, because that's the way things were at his Episcopal boarding school for boys, and then at Annapolis. Then came the war. Joe the Plumber is, apparently, a contractor, hiring men to work for him at things like digging up the blacktop at a gas station to fix the water main. That is far more real than reading a canned text handed to you by a team of platitudinarians. It is more real than using your lawyer's leverage to funnel money to the local slumlord. Now if Obama had spent a year or two pounding in joists to shore up a bad roof in a tenement building, I'd revise my remarks. The point is that he has done nothing of the sort, ever. And he may be the first major candidate about whom one can say that: the first pure product of the land of Pointless Work; an academic who was handsomely paid for teaching nonsense; then a lawyer handsomely paid for cleaning up no neighborhoods; now a candidate whose deep anthropological appeal -- regardless of what the politically correct anchor lady would say -- is that he is a tall man with a deep voice. Would that he possessed the habits of life that have been known to go along with those.
Part 3
There was a tense moment in that interview between Joe the Plumber and the anchorwoman that people haven't really talked about, at least not that I've heard. It marks the difference between those who believe in natural spheres of authority and therefore in natural limits to any particular office's authority, and those who do not, and for good reason -- since if there are no natural authorities, whoever possesses power may do with it whatever he pleases, so long as he can keep the proles content. When the reporter asked him about Obama's intention to take money from the supposed rich, Joe, who is not rich, did not at first ask "How much" or "Who's giving" but "By what authority?"
That one word opens up the little red playbook of the totalitarian left. For the left can be defined as that political movement that seeks to destroy all subsidiary authorities, in the cause of some grand superauthority, like the dicatorship of the proletariat. It is why the left despises families. Oh, I don't mean that leftists do not love their children. Maybe they do; that's not the point. The point is that the left seeks to rob the family of its status as a natural, pre-political institution, with a natural authority of its own, an authority that the state must respect and sometimes even subserve. It is why the left derides the father. Oh, I don't mean that leftists slap their fathers into old folks' homes at the first opportunity. I mean that they hate the fatherhood of the father; he stands in their society-remaking path. They're not too fond of motherhood either, and for the same reasons. And the church. And the municipality. And traditions peculiar to a people. They'll allow us to worship God, silly fools that we are, so long as we keep it private -- which means, so long as nobody gets the idea that states and statesman and Really Smart People who want to run everything also stand under the judgment of God, and will have to answer for their deeds.
And the totalitarian tendencies of the left are in full sight in this campaign. Whatever you think of talk radio (and I think a range of things about it, depending on the talker), it sure beats the goosestepping print media and the hairsprayed and trussed-up kicklines, ever to the left, on the old television networks. But the left is not simply suggesting that talk radio be gagged. They're promising it. The threatened return of the Fairness Doctrine is the sort of thing I have seen quite a lot of in academe. One time, for example, renegade feminist Camille Paglia was invited to give a talk at Brown, a small community college across town from where I teach. She did, to a packed house. The next day, professors were snooping for a victim -- "Who was responsible for bringing that woman here!" And now, "Fox News has made me lose three points of my lead!" And "Rush Limbaugh is a terrorist!" Then we have the ACORN voter frauds. Then we have the Freedom of Choice Act, which Obama promises to sign, and which will remove from Christian doctors and nurses any protection for conscience; rather like Massachusetts' recent slamming of Boston's Catholic adoption agency. "Do it our way, or else" -- that is the totalitarian slogan, and that is simply the default position for the hard left. They make ol' Joe McCarthy look like a piker. The worst that you could say about McCarthy is that that ambitious and self-serving man tried to cast out demons with the weapons of Beelzebub. The left isn't trying to do that. They want to cast out all authorities in the name of Beelzebub. The Constitution? Just a document to be used to destroy rival authorities to the statist powers -- including, yes, the family (and that is how the "liberty" of abortion ought to be viewed). Beyond that? Nothing at all. Maybe a nice design with which to emboss the bathroom tissue in the halls of power.